**FILE** In this July 13, 1993, file photo, Ellie Nesler is seen in Sonora, Calif. Nesler, who sparked a national debate about vigilantism after killing her son's accused molester in a courtroom in 1993, has died of cancer. A spokeswoman for the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento says Nesler died there Friday, Dec. 26, 2008. The 56-year-old had battled breast cancer since 1994. (AP Photo/George Nikitin, file)

Photo: George Nikitin, AP

**FILE** In this July 13, 1993, file photo, Ellie Nesler is seen in...

In her heart, Ellie Nesler loved her children, friends say, even when that love caused her enormous trouble and pain.

Nesler, who died Friday, gained international notoriety in 1993 when she took a .25-caliber pistol into a Tuolumne County courtroom and put five bullets in the head and body of a man accused of molesting her son. She served 3 1/2 years as her case wended through trial and appeal before she pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 1997, a plea bargain that released her back to her son and daughter.

But her story did not end there. Nesler spent the last 10 years struggling with the complicated power of fame and infamy, battling cancer and drugs, earning money from her tale, losing it all, and seeing her son fall into his own spiral of violence, ending with his imprisonment for murder.

Nesler died at UC Davis Medical Center of complications from cancer - two days too soon to meet her grandson, born to her daughter, Becky, on Sunday afternoon, said family friend Diane Morrow.

"Ellie really loved her kids. And Ellie had a very hard upbringing - she was dealt a very hard hand in life, and I don't think she played it very well, but she did her best," Morrow said. "And she really did love her kids."

Nesler was 40 when she and her son, Willie, were called to court in Jamestown (Tuolumne County) to testify against Daniel Driver, who stood accused of molesting five boys at a summer church camp in the mid-1980s, including Nesler's son.

As her attorneys later told it, in arguments that her actions followed a mental breakdown, Nesler saw Driver "smirk" at her son in open court, walked out to her car, returned with a handgun, and shot Driver in the head as he sat in shackles. He died an hour later.

"I may not be God," Nesler reportedly said. "But I tell you what, I'm the closest damn thing to it."

In the ensuing days and months Nesler was hailed as a folk hero by some who sent her flowers and filled her cell with gifts, calling her act righteous justice. Others decried her act of vigilantism, and she faced a charge of murder.

In trial and in appeals, as her attorneys argued her actions amounted to insanity, Nesler's own troubled history played out before cameras and reporters: drug use, including on the day of the killing; her own childhood molestation; her father's beating of her mother before his death of cancer in 1988.

In 1993, as she awaited sentencing in her first trial, Nesler learned she had cancer. Four years later, after a finding by the California Supreme Court of juror misconduct in her trial and in an agreement with prosecutors, she was released to the company of her children.

"Although I felt justified at the time, I can honestly say I'm sorry for taking a man's life," she said in a pained statement the day of her release.

"There was a positive note on that day," said attorney Blair White, a family friend who briefly represented Nesler at the beginning of the case and who went with her children to pick Nesler up at prison upon her release.

"Unfortunately, it degenerated real fast, because she became nothing other than Ellie Nesler, this woman who had the notoriety," he said. "She became Ellie Nesler, the vigilante, and never got away from that."

Nesler had signed a $110,000 contract with television producers in 1994. "Judgment Day: The Ellie Nesler Story" aired in 1999. But the money and fame did not calm Nesler's life, friends said.

"When she first got out, she was doing pretty good," Morrow said. But after receiving the television money, she said, "She went through all of it. All of it. She ended up homeless and at my doorstep."

In 2002, Nesler was sentenced to six years in prison for selling drugs - something Morrow said she believed Nesler turned to as a way of making ends meet. She was released in 2006.

"If you really knew Ellie when she wasn't on the drugs, she was really a good person," said Morrow, who became estranged from Nesler some years ago but remains close to her daughter, Becky, and will perform Nesler's service. "She had a really good heart, and she loved God."

In 2004, while Nesler was serving her drug sentence, her son, who developed a juvenile record during his mother's murder trial and who became a teenage runaway, killed a man by stomping him to death. He is now serving a sentence of 25 years to life in Susanville (Lassen County), where California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Terry Thornton said he had spoken with family members and applied for leave to attend his mother's funeral Friday in Angels Camp (Calaveras County).

"He was expecting the death, and he's handling it as well as anybody could be handling it," said Thornton, who said the leave request was still being reviewed.

"He had been in constant communication with his mother. He knew that she was very ill," she said. "She still kept in contact with him until she could no longer communicate with him."